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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27417316">Midnight</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/eirabach/pseuds/eirabach'>eirabach</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Thunderbirds</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, F/M, Nightmares, Pen and Ink Week 2020, Prompt Fic</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 23:09:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>922</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27417316</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/eirabach/pseuds/eirabach</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The brighter the light the deeper the shadow lies.</p><p>[Pen and Ink + Nightmare for day four of pen and ink week on tumblr]</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Penelope Creighton-Ward/Gordon Tracy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Midnight</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p></p><div class="">
  <p>Gordon doesn't have nightmares.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She'd asked him about it once, after another rescue that wasn't, but he'd shook his head, tugged at the ends of her ponytail and smiled like she ought to believe him. Said,<em> haven't got the imagination for it</em> and when she'd frowned, her fingertips pink with the blood from his baldric, he'd just tightened his grip on her hand.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>
    <em>"It's a big ocean, Pen, and I'm just one small squid. It's part of the job. You know that."</em>
  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She does know it, of course she does, her own ledger dark red and sodden through with guilt that weighs far, far heavier than she'll ever let on. Failure is just a part of success and she knows that. Copes.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>And perhaps Gordon doesn't have nightmares.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But Penelope does.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She's had them since she was a child, the corridors of the manor a dark, never ending maze filled with sounds she could never explain, the cavernous space under her bed home to an entire family of creatures with long fingers and blind eyes that grasped and clawed at the bed curtains and unsuspecting ankles. There'd been a portrait of her mother hung at the end of the bed, and her cold, painted eyes had followed her every panicked move. The thin Mona Lisa smile mocking her as she'd sobbed and sweated her way through another long, lonely night.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She misses it now. Misses those childhood horrors. Because she knows now that's all they were -- the terrors of a child yet to realise what the world held in store -- and, god. God what she wouldn't do to have them back, now that she <em>knows</em>.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Now she stands at the shore, skirt whipping around her ankles in the unnatural wind. The sky is black, the air hot in her throat and burning her lungs, the sand between her toes scorching her and the sea --</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The sea is on fire.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Slick with oil and ink it billows upward like a tornado, sending up pillars of flame and ash that she swallows, that swallow her, the lap lap lap of embers at her feet. Orange and red and -- Yellow. Yellow at the shoreline. Scorched and smouldering and cold, dead eyes that follow her as she pushes into the current. Fights it and burns with it and let's it -- she let it.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She wakes with a jolt. With her heart in her throat and hands that scrabble for dry land. Her body is still sinking under the flaming waves, the cursed water rising until it threatens to spill from her eyes.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>They come up empty.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The pillow beside her is cool, the room island dark, and she knows there hasn't been a call out. She knows, because Gordon likes to cling and Penelope likes to let him. And they could buy a bigger bed, but they don't. Instead they wrap themselves up in a single bed, in each other, and laugh under the oversized covers like the teenagers they never had the chance to be. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She knows, because she's been woken enough times by sleepy grousing and sharp elbows and kisses dropped to her hairline.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>She knows what a call out feels like.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>For a moment, she wonders if she's even awake. If she even slept at all. The air in her chest is hot still, humidity sticking the covers to her legs as she kicks her way free, and it isn't until her feet hit cool tile that she rallies. Steadies. Feels the warm breeze on her cheek from the open window and thinks, <em>oh</em>.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>--</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>He tells her he doesn't have the imagination for it -- and he's not lying. Not really. Imagination suggests something fake, false, a daydream turned deep water dark, and Gordon doesn't bother with that sort of stuff. Gordon knows reality is worse than the dreams could ever be.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>His nightmares are silent, peaceful as the slow sinking of failure in the glare of Four's high beams. They're the faces bloated black and the hair like seaweed and the long slow crawl back from the depths with your own mortality stowed in the hold. They're the <em>sorrys</em> and the dog tags and the minutes between surface and retrieval where he gasps bitter recycled air and practices a smile that doesn't sting.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>They're in every breath he takes that his mother doesn't, in every fuel spill, every innocent creature washed up dead in a brother's firey wake. In every part of the job that keeps him from her bed, from her company, that keeps duty and desire warring within him until neither seem right, seem fair, seem <em>doable </em>any more.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>They linger at the edges of the nights when he watches her sleep, his eyes burning from water and for the lack of it, when his nerves stretch tight and his legs twitch and --</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>--</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>And she slips from the window, bare toes curling against the rock as she totters down the slope. She can hear it now, the steady splash of water, the rhythm of it, heartbeat steady. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>
    <em>Kick, pull, kick, pull, turn.</em>
  </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>The pool is a void, black within blackness, but Gordon throws up stars in his wake and she follows them down to the water. Kneels at the edge and counts them. Counts his strokes. Counts her breaths. Waits. </p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Waits for the pause and the smile and the secrets they'll swallow until they choke on them, back in the privacy of that too small bed where the water threatens to drown them both.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>Because Penelope has nightmares.</p>
</div><div class="">
  <p>But Gordon doesn't.</p>
</div>
  </div></div>
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